| I agree that the shoe-horning of NSA / GCHQ into every possible thread is tiresome. But are you aware that US Government already collects and stores very many fingerprints? Here's a 2008 Reuters article: (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...) > The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion. > [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said. > More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said. They fingerprint vast numbers of people, and use "detection of criminals" as a reason, but don't seem to catch that many people. See also DNA gathering - the UK has a huge horrible DNA database. It's easy to get on that database (be arrested) and hard to get taken off that database. I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprints were being stored by some government agency somewhere. Not sure that'd be NSA, because there's not much they can do with it. |